inverted faces (i.e., those presented upside-down) are more difficult to perceive (the Thatcher effect is a good illustration of this). In their landmark study, Bentin et al. found that inverted faces increased the latency of the N170 component. Jacques and colleagues further studied the timecourse of the face inversion effect (FIE) using an adaptation paradigm. When the same stimulus is presented multiple times, the neuronal response decreases over time; when a different stimulus is presented, the response recovers. The conditions under which a "release from adaptation" occurs therefore provides a way to measure stimulus similarity. In their experiment, Jacques et al. found that the release from adaptation is smaller and occurs 30 ms later for inverted faces, indicating that the neuronal population encoding face identity require additional processing time to detect the identity of inverted faces. In an experiment examining the effects of race on the N170's amplitude, it was found that an "Other-Race Effect" was elicited in conjunction with face inversions. Vizioli and colleagues examined the effect of face recognition impairment while subjects process same race (SR) or other race (OR) pictures. The research team devised a N170 experiment based on the premise that visual expertise plays a critical role in inversion, hypothesizing that viewers' greater level of expertise with SR faces (holistic processing) should elicit a stronger FIE compared to OR face stimuli. The authors recorded EEGs from Western Caucasian and East Asian subjects (two separate groups) who were presented with pictures of Western Caucasian, East Asian and African America faces in upright and inverted orientations. All the facial stimuli were cropped to remove external features (i.e. hair, beards, hats, etc.). Both groups displayed a later N170 with larger amplitude (over the right hemisphere) for inverted than upright same-race (SR) faces, but showed no inversion effect for OR and AA photo stimuli. Moreover, no race effects were observed in regard to the peak amplitude of the N170 for upright faces in both groups of participants. The results also found no significant latency differences among the races of stimuli, but facial inversion did increase and delay the N170 amplitude and onset respectively. They conclude that the subjects' lack of experience with inverted faces makes processing such stimuli more difficult than pictures shown in their canonical orientation, regardless of what race the stimulus is. Besides modulation by inversion and race, emotional expressions have also been a focus of N170 face